Cortex voice control using Amazon Echo

can well imagine multiple Echo could be useful ... our automation of lights, taps, heating, machines, etc, all works fine, generally, but being able to cover exceptions via voice would be very handy - as when occasionally not wanting lights to come on when enter a room (someone dozing, say), or wanting a jug rather than a bucket filled with water, or extra bath water when soaking away, etc, etc ...

looking forward to code examples - it being much easier to adjust than write anew, especially when starting from scratch !

one query - is communication to / from Cortex via WiFi, or hardwired ... and, if the former, does it give issues ... ask because we have tablets communicating with Cortex via WiFi, and lock-ups are more than seldom - cure is always to simply off / on the tablet's WiFi connection, but has to be done manually ... our feeling is it's an Android WiFi issue, rather than Cortex, but it's difficult to be sure ...

Chris

The communication to Cortex from the Amazon cloud is via your internet router, so whether its WiFi or hard-wired will depend on how the PC Cortex is running on connects to your home network.

My Corex PC uses WiFi and I dont have any issues or latency.

Cheers

Neil

thanks ...

we do find WiFi fragile - our set-up includes several Android tablets & their cameras, iOS devices, laptops, desktop, and the Cortex PC, all going via three Devolo WiFi hubs on a dLan network, and via a Genexis router ... and, every month or two or three, we find we have to manually off / on the router and/or the dLan hub and/or the Wifi hubs ...

our impression is all issues are related to inadequate buffer management, leading to jams, in one or other of those devices ... but who knows !

and most times we off / on any of those, we find we also have to off / on the WiFi connection on some or many of the tablets ...

there's lots of variation in what & when & how-often, so it seems to be impossible to get a clear view of what the problem is ...

on top of which the Cortex PC WiFi connection now & then becomes what it calls Limited, or just plain disconnects ... no idea what Limited means (Googling hasn't helped), or why the disconnect ... either happens very irregularly - several times in as many days, through to not for months & months ...

we do have an Ethernet network, but the darned fans in the switches are just too noisy, plus the tablets can only connect via WiFi ...

Hi,
I've also been busy hooking up Idratek to Alexa and it is working fairly well, even setting lights by percentage - the Smart Home skill helps. Also means that I can use Alexa schedules to trigger idratek and others with the same alarm.
I've had to hard code my IP address and login - would be great to get oAuth support or even some way to pull data from an alexa list - happy to share code if any interest.
Cheers
A

Hi all - I'm looking for info relating to using my Alexa with my Cortex - Can anyone please offer any advice

+1 for shared code on GitHub or GitLab and any further hints and tips.

+1 from me also - I'm by no means a software engineer so a very basic guide on how to do this would be useful...

Karam - if you see this, I wonder if you've considered building 'smart speaker' integration into cortex somehow????

I've achieved voice control of the house using Amazon Echo dot using the below method:
1. Get a raspberry pi (i'm using a pi3). Do a basic install of raspbian and make sure it's up to date. I've put it on a fixed IP on my network
2. Install HABRIDGE from BWSSYSTEMS (*it presupposes a little knowledge of how to work in a linux/raspberry pi environment) - https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-brid...ster/README.md
basics are, install the latest version (5.3.0?) as a .jar, make sure java is up to date on your pi
run it (by hand to start with, but you can set it up as a service)
go to the ip address of the pi in a browser, and you'll see the bridge control pages

habridge2.jpg

add a device, then in the device commanders lower down, you can call the http link for the "turn light on" and "turn light off" - for example "http://192.168.1.65:8000/?79~Turn%20On;" - these can be found by right clicking in the web interface for Cortex and copying link

habridge.jpg

3. Tell your amazon echo dot to "detect my devices" and hey presto! "Alexa, turn master bedroom light on".

Note:
The HABRIDGE creates a "virtual" phillips hue device that you can control via Alexa
it needs to be on port 80 or it won't work! Previously, they allowed it to be on other ports, but now they've locked it down to port 80 only

Thanks for this David - I have been looking into this for some time and actually Karam suggested this might be a way forward, and your post tonight inspired me to have a go!

I've been playing with HaBridge tonight and have managed to get it to link to my echo dots as a Philips device but I'm now struggling to get it to issue commands to Cortex over http. The 'link' method from the webserver page you suggested works in a browser address bar - but only when there's an active log in to the Cortex webserver. Have you successfully set any username/password combinations in your http commands, such as http://user:[email protected]:...1~Turn%20Off;? This doesn't work for me, but maybe theres a way round it, I am not even sure that Cortex is designed for control in this way... Have you secured your webserver with passwords?

I'm working on it being an allowed IP address on the local network which bypasses that.